


Escape from Arkham Asylum

by JaramaV



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020), Harley Quinn (Cartoon 2019), Harley Quinn (Comics)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:53:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29504406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaramaV/pseuds/JaramaV
Summary: Dr. Harleen Quinzel was lucky to get such a high-paying job right out of grad school. Maybe to a less brazen woman, she would have seemed too lucky; but Quinzel told herself not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Most women in her field would kill for an opportunity like this, and she wasn’t about to waste it.Quinzel gets a job at Arkham Asylum after her predecessor’s death. There, she meets a mysterious man who calls himself “Joker.” As Joker worms his way into her head, she must fight to keep from losing herself in his insanity. Six months later, Harley is a changed woman, desperately trying to leave her past behind. She encounters an enigmatic botanist and the two form a reluctant alliance.
Relationships: Joker (DCU)/Harleen Quinzel, Pamela Isley & Harleen Quinzel, Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel
Kudos: 24





	1. Arkham

“Harleen. Dr. Harleen Quinzel, PhD.” The woman grinned, extending a cheerful hand to the bleary-eyed security guard. He studied her for a few seconds, seemingly lost in thought.

“Oh. Right. You’re the new psychologist,” he said. “Step forward, please?” He brandished a metal detector wand, and Harleen did as she was told. “You’re all good. Go through the gate, down the hall, and to the left. Your office is the third one on the right,” said the security guard. He pressed a button under his desk, and the metal bars in front of Harleen swung open with an ear-splitting shriek. Harleen walked through the gate, and she could almost make out the guard’s hurried “good luck!” through the sound of it slamming shut behind her.

As Harleen made her way to her new office, she fought to shove down the mounting fear and revulsion she felt practically emanating from Arkham’s walls. Every inch of the place seemed to be covered in grime, in a way that Harleen thought almost seemed _intentional_. The lights above her would probably have once seemed harsh and clinical, but now the dimming light bulbs surrounded in cracked, yellowing plastic barely succeeded in illuminating the hallway at all. Harleen’s shadow seemed preternaturally large in the faint light. She made a mental note to ask whoever was in charge to spend some money and fix up the place a bit; there was no way this unpleasant atmosphere was helping the patients recover.

Harleen’s musings were interrupted when she reached the door to her office. She fumbled in the darkness for a light switch, and the excited grin she had been holding since the security guard faded only a little when she flipped it and nothing happened. She hastily turned on the flashlight on her phone, and for the first time set eyes on the office that would practically be her home for the next six months. It was, in keeping with the rest of Arkham she had seen so far, more than a little run-down. Next to the door was a metal table, bolted to the floor, with a single metal ring affixed to the top. Harleen assumed it was for the patients. On the other end of the room was a large wooden desk, its surface empty except for a single sheet of paper: Harleen’s client list. Despite the room’s… rather spartan finishing, Harleen was filled with a sense of optimism. Give her a few days, a new light bulb, and maybe a few comforting paintings of nature, and Harleen knew she could start to do some genuinely good work in this place.

***

Over the next week or so, Harleen set to work renovating her office. She brought in a desk lamp, re-painted the walls, and even replaced the light-bulbs in the hallway to her office. She wasn’t completely naive; she knew that the state Arkham was in, and the apparent apathy of its administrators towards making sure she had even the most basic information about the asylum’s operations, were unusual, to say the least; nonetheless, Harleen was a woman in a field dominated by men, and she was well used to being ignored and disrespected by now. In her experience, she just needed to focus on her own work and rely on her bosses as little as possible – an arrangement that they seemed to be completely fine with, given that she hadn’t met face-to-face with the warden since her job interview.

Soon, Harleen was ready for her first patient, a burglar named Selina Kyle (though Harleen knew her primarily by the press’s name for her, “Catwoman.”) She arrived to her first proper day of work as a psychologist bright and early, with a spring in her step and a cheerful greeting to the ever-sleepy security guard, entering her newly-decorated office to wait for Kyle to arrive. Judging by the files she had dug out of Arkham’s records room, Kyle was a brilliant criminal with a substantially smaller body count than many of her fellow inmates. Harleen had chosen Kyle as her first patient in the hopes that Harleen could make progress with her relatively quickly; an early win with someone like Kyle could be enough to convince her superiors to give her more resources.

Harleen jumped at the sound of a rough knock on the door, and she barely had time to arrange her face into a welcoming smile before the door opened to admit a hulking security guard holding on to a sullen woman in an orange jumpsuit – Selina Kyle. The guard roughly sat Kyle down in the chair Harleen had procured for the inmates, and cuffed her hands to the table, stepping back to admire his handiwork. Harleen studied Kyle as she waited for the guard to leave. The woman sitting in front of her was short, almost as short as Harleen, but she moved with a grace and confidence that should have been impossible after being manhandled by the gruff security guard. Harleen had been probing Kyle’s deep brown eyes for some sign of emotion when she realized the guard intended to stay. With an exasperated sigh, she turned to the bearded man.

“You can leave us alone now, please,” she said.

“No-can-do, little lady,” the guard said as Harleen suppressed a grimace at his patronizing tone. “I have to stay in the room to protect you from the criminals.”

“The patients.” Harleen pushed down her rising anger and did her best to remain polite. “Selina Kyle is my patient, and the two of us are entitled to privacy so that we can work.”

“But protocol says-” Harleen didn’t even bother letting the guard finish his sentence this time.

“I don’t care what protocol says. Selina here may be in prison, but she still has rights. One of which is the right to privacy when she’s interacting with me. Do you understand?” Harleen glared at the guard, daring him to disagree. He opened his mouth to argue before he paused and seemed to think better of it.

“It’s your funeral, lady.” He practically stomped his way out of her office. Harleen could just make out a muffled “what a bitch” through the door after he closed it behind him, and turned back to her patient just in time to see Selina hurriedly suppress a look of surprise and admiration.

“Now that’s been dealt with,” Harleen said, smiling warmly. “My name is Dr. Harleen Quinzel, but you can just call me Harleen.” Selina paused for a moment, then grinned mischievously.

“Well, you’re a lot prettier than the last psychologist I met with, that’s for sure,” she purred.

***

Eventually, Harleen and Selina settled into a rhythm. Every few days, Harleen would meet with Selina, and they would… just talk. Selina was tight-lipped, and never let Harleen speak seriously about her treatment for long, but Harleen was surprised to learn that the two women had more in common than she expected: Selina’s childhood fascination with martial arts mirrored a young Harleen Quinzel’s own talent for gymnastics, and what little information Harleen could gleen about Selina’s family suggested that her father may have been at least as abusive as Harleen’s was. The psychologist was happy to share details about her own life with Selina, remaining confident in her belief that her patient would be more open if she was given the time and attentiveness that Harleen suspected the rest of the asylum staff denied their inmates. After a few sessions, Harleen added two more patients to her schedule, both petty criminals who mostly glared silently at her every time they met, but most of Harleen’s time was spent on Selina. She knew it was unprofessional to focus so much on one patient over the others, but Selina was the only one who seemed to take any interest in what Harleen had to say, and Harleen could feel herself beginning to genuinely like and respect Selina – not just as a patient, but as a person.

“It was nice seeing you again,” said Harleen told Selina as they neared the end of their fourth session. “You’re a fascinating woman.”

“If you're trying to flirt with me, you're going to have to do better than that,” Selina replied languidly.

“But I’m not sure you’re taking our sessions seriously enough.” Selina snorted and moved to speak, but Harleen cut her off. “If you want any chance of getting out of here, you need to open up to me. I know you’re not a bad person, but I can’t help you if you don’t put in the work to change.”

“What if I don’t want to change?” Selina’s tone was sharper, almost angry. Harleen knew that was a good sign; it meant she had gotten past Selina’s defenses.

“You want to change – it’s written all over your face every time we meet,” Harleen said, closing in on Selina’s weak point. “You hate this life, hate what it makes you do, but you choose it anyways because you don’t see any other option. I can give you that option, but you have to trust me.” Selina, for the first time, didn’t have a pithy retort. Harleen smiled, knowing she was finally getting through to the other woman. “That’s our time for today. I’m going to give you a little bit longer between this session and the next, because I want you to think about what I said, OK?” Selina acknowledged Harleen with a small nod of her head, and Harleen called for the security guard, who she thought of as “Muscles” because of his hulking stature, to escort her back to her cell. Today was a good day for Harleen – she was making progress with her first patient, and her next session, after lunch, was with an inmate she was particularly excited to meet.

An hour, a mostly uneaten ham sandwich, and some nervous final preperation later, Harleen met with her fourth patient at Arkham Asylum. As Muscles escorted the unnaturally pale man, whom he treated with notably more respect than the other inmates, into her office, Harleen felt a jolt of excitement run through her body. The man practically oozed the manic energy of someone well and truly insane. Just his presence was enough to fill up the room, and Harleen’s thoughts, in a way that no other patient of hers ever had. She turned to him and smiled. “My name is Dr. Harleen Quinzel, but you can just call me Harleen.”

“Well, my dear, you can call me The Joker.”

***

_Six months later_

“Harley. Harley Quinn.” The woman forced her mouth into what she desperately hoped was a smile as she thrust a pale hand grasping a wad of dollar bills towards the ticket agent. “How far away can I get for a hundred and thirty-five dollars?”


	2. Descent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...In which our protagonist is foiled by a loud gate, an absentee administrator, and an easily-avoidable typo...

“You know, I didn’t always want this life,” said Selina. “I used to help people – there was this girl, Holly.”

“Mhmm.” Harleen really was doing her best to pay attention, but no matter how hard she concentrated on Selina’s unfolding breakthrough, she inevitably found her mind slipping back to thoughts of the Joker and his fascinating brand of insanity.

“For fuck’s sake, you’re acting like a schoolgirl with a crush on her lab partner,” Selina said, exasperated. “Grow a pair and ask him out or-” Selina was cut short by Harleen, whose mind had momentarily been snapped back into the present by her patient’s sudden vulgarity.

“Sorry. I had a late night last night.” Harley wasn’t lying, but she refrained from mentioning that it was because she had stayed up for hours reading and re-reading her already extensive notes from her session with the Joker. “Our time’s pretty much gone, so I have some homework for you. I want you to think about what you would be doing now if you had been able to survive without resorting to crime.”

“Well, you insist on meeting with me at this ungodly hour in the morning, so I’d probably be sleeping,” Selina said. Harleen offered a perfunctory smile before she continued.

“Funny. I want you to take this seriously, though. I know you’ve been having trouble envisioning a life for yourself that doesn’t involve so much…” Harleen paused, choosing her next words carefully. “Hardship… and I want you to try to get past that.”

“Whatever you say, doc.” Selina acceded. “Hey Muscles! It’s time for you to drag me back to my cell!” she shouted loud enough for the security guard to hear her from the other side of the wall. As Selina was led out of the office, Harleen paused to gather her thoughts. She was meeting with Joker this afternoon (after an appointment with the warden to talk about getting more resources – today was a big day), and she knew she needed to be ready. If Selina’s mind was a carefully-guarded palace surrounded by walls, Joker’s was a labyrinth of as-yet-undetermined proportions, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. Harleen knew that men like Joker were dangerous, in fact she’d been warned about them by some of her instructors in grad school, but she also knew that trying to resist his pull would be ultimately futile. She had to run headlong into the maze and hope she could emerge from the other side unscathed. She thought back to the end of their last session, hoping to glean some guidance for how to greet her patient during their next appointment.

“Before your goons drag me away, I want to ask you for a little favor,” the Joker had said with a sneer.

“Well, I can’t promise anything for sure, but-”

“When I was a boy, my parents used to make me go to the grocery store with them.” Normally a man interrupting Harleen to talk about his childhood would have made her furious, but she tamped down her emotions. “It was painfully boring – that was part of why I killed them. I think. Anyways, the only good part of those awful shopping trips was that I always got one of those pudding cups at the end. You know the ones – with the chocolate and the little spoon attached?”

“You killed your parents?” Harleen was surprised. Joker’s files hadn’t mentioned his parents at all, much less that he killed them.

“I’m not sure,” the Joker said. Harleen noted with some surprise that he seemed to be telling the truth. “Also, that’s very much not the point, my dear. Pudding cups. I want one.” Harleen, caught by surprise and distracted by a barrage of theories and potential diagnoses, took a long time to answer.

“Unfortunately, I won’t do that for you,” Harleen said. “I’m not comfortable bringing contraband into the highest-security prison in the country.”

“You don’t know how hard it is in here for someone like me,” the Joker said, pouting exaggeratedly. “The pudding cups in here just aren’t the same.”

“Be that as it may, there’s nothing you can do for you.”

“That’s a shame.” The Joker fell silent, looking down at his hands with an unreadable expression on his face.

“We don’t have a lot of time left, so I want to ask about your parents,” Harleen said. “What did you mean when you said you weren’t sure if you had killed them?” The Joker stayed silent. “Joker? What did you mean? Do you not remember?” Despite her best efforts, the man on the other side of the table stayed silent, and didn’t respond to any of her questions for the rest of the session.

Returning to the present, Harleen glanced at the clock she had hung on the wall, and nearly jumped out of her chair when she saw the time. Hurriedly gathering her thoughts, she set off down the hall to the warden’s office.

Overall, Harleen’s presence had made Arkham noticeably less drab: she had replaced many of the light-bulbs in the hallways near her office, purchased a new nameplate for her door, and even showed up early (or rather even earlier than normal) one day to grease the screeching hinges on the security gate she passed through each morning. Despite her best efforts, though, Arkham seemed determined to remain impossibly somber and dreary. Not matter how many times she mopped the floors, that persistent layer of grime returned within a day or two; faulty wiring meant the lights would flicker on and off eerily even with new light-bulbs; and the day after she finally silenced the security gate, it was back to wailing at her as she entered, as if the asylum itself was laughing at her naivete. Harleen grimaced. Arkham could be a labyrinth even in areas she was familiar with, but the route to the warden’s office was especially confusing; the sleepy security guard, to whom Harleen gave the admittedly un-creative moniker “Sleepy,” explained that warden Sharp insisted on moving his office deeper into the asylum to be closer to the inmates. Harleen rarely ventured this far into the building, preferring to keep to the outer hallways around her office; it was the only way she thought she could maintain a sense of control amidst the disarray and apathy that characterized much of Arkham’s day-to-day operations.

After a number of wrong turns into dark, dead-end hallways, Harleen arrived at warden Sharp’s office. She knocked, and when no one replied she strode confidently into the room, offering a warm greeting to the warden. She was cut short, however, when she realized the office was empty – and seemingly had been for months. The floor was covered in a thick coating of dust and flakes of chipped paint, and the only thing in the room was a single empty desk. Harleen stood, scanning the room over and over in disbelief as she realized that the warden had no intention of meeting with her – or running his prison at all, it seemed. Incensed, she strode out of the room towards the guard station and the exit.

Fueled by rage, Harleen’s journey away from the warden’s office was much faster than the one inwards. She reached the guard station, her footsteps startling the guard out of his slumber, and raised her voice for the first time since she arrived at Arkham almost a month ago.

“How do I get in contact with the warden? And I don’t mean an email or a phone call. How do I talk to him face-to-face?” The guard frowned apologetically.

“Oh, right. Um. The warden couldn’t come in today, but he told me to give you this, uh, somewhere around here…” The guard frantically search around his desk, triumphantly pulling out a single sheet of paper. “Here you go.”

> Mrs. Quinzel, 

“ _Doctor_ Quinzel,” Harleen muttered under her breath.

> Unfortunately, I’m not able to attend out meeting today. However, even if I was there, I would still tell you that we just can’t spare any more funding for your department. Your predecessor made out just fine with the amount of money we gave him, and I’m confident you will find a way to do the same.

“Sorry,” the guard said. Harleen ignored him, turning to the exit. She had an errand to run before she saw the Joker.

***

_Five months later_

Harley glanced around the train car and pulled her hood lower over her face. She wore a red jacket and a black gas station t-shirt that read “Stand for the Cross, Neel for the Flag.” The old her would have laughed at the amateurish typo, but Harley was too preoccupied with worrying about whether her fellow passengers had noticed her pale skin to take any humor from the situation. With a hauntingly familiar shriek, the train ground to a halt in the small rural town of Crown Park, Virginia. Home to the world’s second-largest cheese wheel, and a number of urban legends about a mysterious witch known as “Miss Green.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this chapter was surprisingly hard - translating the Joker from an onscreen/comic book character into something completely written was an interesting challenge.
> 
> I think next chapter will be a little bit shorter (and take longer to come out) but we'll finally meet Ivy and see what Harley's been up to in the current day.


	3. A New Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our protagonist makes a new acquaintance

Pamela “Ivy” Isley was used to people saying outlandish things about her: local legends involving witches and dark magic seemed to shadow her everywhere she went, and even in her childhood she was usually an object of ridicule for her peers. The nicest thing anybody had ever told her was said by her mentor and colleague while she was working on her doctoral thesis.

“You’re completely unlike anyone else I’ve ever met, Pam,” the man – Dr. Woodrue – had said with a warm smile. “You’re going to change the world.”

Ivy still thought about that compliment sometimes. Not because it had made her happy, although it definitely had at the time, but because the man it came from would go on to seduce her and perform a number of wildly illegal experiments on her without her consent, ultimately making her into the woman she was today. It was no wonder then, that Ivy preferred to keep to herself. For Ivy, the cruelty that regular people inevitably heaped on a hermit like herself was simple, easy to understand; survival of the fittest and natural selection were concepts that a botanist like her was well-equipped to handle. Kindness, though, was complicated, and, in her experience, usually nothing more than a veil for an ulterior motive. Ever since she escaped Dr. Woodrue’s grasp, she had resolved to never let another person get as close to her heart as he had. Ivy didn’t know it yet, but that resolve was soon to be tested in a way that it never had been before.

***

With a groan, Harley uncurled her legs from her chest and stood as the train conductor’s voice came crackling over the announcement system.

“We’re now in Crown Park, Virginia,” the conductor said. “We’ll wait here for 10 minutes to allow passengers to leave the train, and the next stop will be in Roanoke in a few hours. Thank you for riding Amtrack!” As Harley stepped out of the train and into the humid Southwest-Virginian air, she realized she was the only one to get off at this stop. Somewhere in the back of her head, the voice she thought of as “Harleen” wondered whether it was wise to hide out in such a small town. As usual, Harley ignored her.

After taking a moment to observe her surroundings, (the train “station” was little more than a bench with a small awning and sign next to it. Nailed to the awning was an official-looking but faded paper that read “As of May, 2007, bus service to this area is canceled due to insufficient funds.”) Harley sighed, and set off down the gravel road towards what she hoped was a town.

***

Ivy was doing pretty well for herself: she was making noticeable progress on several of her ongoing experiments, her plants were flourishing in the hot Virginian summer, and it had been at least a few months since any of the townspeople had wandered into the woods attempting to make a virgin sacrifice in her name; it was just her damn luck that today she had to deal with a new visitor to the town she had come to view as her domain. She first took notice of the strange woman when she got off the train early that morning, and had been mentally tracking her for a few hours since. Normally, Ivy would leave visitors to the town alone unless they provoked her, but this woman seemed different. The plants spoke of preternaturally pale skin, and a face haunted by some as-of-yet undiscovered, but very dark, past. Realizing she couldn’t risk any disturbances to her experiments at such a crucial time, Ivy resolved to turn the mysterious new woman away.

The pale woman wasn’t the first unwelcome visitor Ivy had to defend herself from. In these instances, the local legends usually worked in her favor: she could stalk visitors along the road for a bit, maybe animate a few vines to scare them, and eventually they would give up and return to civilization, taking with them a fear of the town that would help scare away future interlopers. Ivy dashed through the woods with superhuman speed, and within a few minutes she was close enough to lay eyes on her adversary for the first time.

The woman, who must have been walking along the road for several miles by now, was sweating through a thick red jacket, underneath which was a black t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Stand for the Flag, Neel for the Cross.” Ivy would only take these details in later, though, as the botanist found herself unable to tear her eyes away from the woman’s face. The plants had called the woman “pale,” but that didn’t even begin to cover it. Her visage was stark-white – whiter than a dahlia in full bloom, and shinier too thanks to a thick layer of sweat glistening on her cheeks. Ivy wondered what could possibly have caused a human being to look so… blank, like the pages of the journal Ivy wrote in every night.

Ivy ignored her curiosity, and sent a vine shooting out of the ground, entangling the woman’s feet and sending her careening into the dust.

“Fuck!” she shouted loudly before stumbling back to her feet. She glanced around the road as if to make sure no one had seen her fall, and went to take anther step. Unfortunately for her, Ivy sent more vines snaking up from the dirt below, rooting the woman in place.

Ivy lept out from the woods, but before she could deliver her usual ominous speech about returning to the place from whence one came (and so on and so forth), the woman interrupted her.

“Holy shit,” the woman yelped. “Are you… Are you Pamela Isley?”

_Fuck_

Ivy had a lot of reasons to abhor killing, and it was for those reasons that she had always refrained from executing the people who had come to her village in the past – a pattern she had intended to keep to with this new woman. But Ivy also knew that her aversion to killing wasn’t worth risking her location getting out. If this woman knew her identity, she was a threat that Ivy had no choice other than to terminate.

So Ivy, forcibly pushing her guilt back down into her subconscious, reached deep into the dirt, feeling for the roots she knew lay dormant beneath her feet. With the barest thought, she brought them to life; impossibly large growths of vegetal matter burst from the ground, showering both women in loose earth, their prehensile tips reaching like so many tentacles, preparing to turn the woman into a cloud of viscera, and–

Ivy gasped. The woman had danced out of the way with almost superhuman speed, and stood panting a few meters away.

“I’m a friend of Selina Kyle’s,” the woman said. “She told me about you.”

To her credit, Ivy only stood still for a few moments before she strode forward menacingly, hoping her anger would hide the surprise Selina’s name elicited in her. “If you think mentioning Selina Kyle is supposed to endear me to you, you’re sorely mistaken,” she boomed, her voice dripping with a contempt she no longer felt.

“Wait...” If Ivy hadn’t known better, she would have sworn the woman was grinning. “Did you two… you know… bone?” The woman pronounced “bone” with the poorly-disguised excitement of a child just learning what the word meant. 

Ivy blinked, and something in her broke; she couldn’t kill this woman, with her obvious immaturity and mysterious gymnastic talent. “No,” she lied. “You had better come with me. The locals here tend not to take kindly to new visitors.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who has read and given kudos on this fic so far! I hope you're having fun reading it.


End file.
